I’m sorry for delay, but I’m still stuck with my students’ papers. I had merely a couple of hours to test the new camera. My reaction: it’s just amazing… The AX2000 makes so beautiful pictures that sitting only a meter away from my 52’ Sony Bravia TV it seems like looking through a window glass…

Arkady Bolotin wrote:4. You will be laughing at me but resolution wise, under the good light two cams – FX7E and AX2000E -- have similar resolution, maybe the AX2000E has a little advantage.

Effective resolution is a dynamic thing depending on contrast and optical behavior of the lens. All camcorders tend to excel in low-contrast situations.

When you have time, go to a high contrast situation instead, take it out under your unforgiving scorching sun. Test the new lens there where you will find detail with both bright light and shadow. A crowd of people, houses on the hills... How does fine detail look there? I expect that's where you should see a difference in effective resolution.

Well Arkady, the resolution chart images from the fx7 and your new cam surely illustrate the differences in low lightLike yourself I have fx7 and HC1 cameras and am looking to acquire another for low light ability. It will probablu be the fx1000 however for practical reasons as I need firewire output. I'm assuming though that the ax2000 and the fx1000 will perform similarly

According to Adam Witt’s testimony (he previewed Sony HXR-NX5U – professional sibling of HDR-AX2000U at ProVideo Coalition.com), “The NX5U’s images are virtually identical to those from the HVR-Z5U” (professional version of HDR-FX1000U).

About the concrete walls, what makes your comparison difficult is that the 2 cameras don't have the same sharpening settings - look at the blue marking on the car: the AX2000 is soft, the FX7 is sharp (therefore making any noise worse). So we might be mixing 2 different issues: noise, and aliasing (which looks like noise but isn't). It's a bit unfair maybe to the FX7: stronger in-camera sharpening causes aliasing and makes noise more apparent. That's why I turned down sharpness a bit from the default value: to get a cleaner, more beautiful picture. Ideally, you would want to find a sharpening setting that makes the blue marking look similarly sharp in both cameras, and from there see whatever difference remains in noise & aliasing.

But anyway I'm sure you'll find the AX2000 to exhibit less noise naturally, as is already widely known.

About Adam Wilt's review, ProVideoCoalition is a quality website with highly qualified guest bloggers and great original contents, so there's no issue linking to them.

Interesting… I did not adjusted sharpness in either camera during the test: after countless changes of the camcorder recording, at the end I left my FX7 in its factory settings (sharpness=7 in the scale from 0 to 15), and I didn’t touch yet the detail level of AX2000. Therefore, it can be readily assumed that in their new cameras Sony finally shifted the default sharpness level toward the soft end. The question is why they did this.

I want to share with you one of my last observations/revelations regarding recording pattern of the AX2000.

I always knew that closing the camera’s aperture could cause loss of picture detail, but with my FX7, I never observed it. I freely changed the aperture usually keeping it at f5.6 (under strong light) and never saw any perceptible resolution fall.

No such luck with AX2000… Yesterday’s morning I recorded a couple of shots with two different settings: iris = f4 and shutter = 1/50p against iris = f5.6 and shutter = 1/25p. To my surprise, the pictures produced with the aperture at f4 were noticeably sharper...

I wonder, does this mean the AX2000 can be a school exhibit demonstrating physic phenomenon of diffraction? On the other hand, maybe, the shutter speed has something to do with it.